Double Your Pleasure

I want to take a moment and talk about the duality of characters in literature. This was inspired by my current reading Possession by A.S.Byatt. Generally I am not a fan, but I am working on a old story that involves a alledged case of possession and I was just curious to see what girlfriend did in her novel. This moment in particular interested me:

"There were now two Vals. One sat silently at home in old jeans...This one had lustreless brown hair, very straight...the other who wore a tight black skirt and a black jacket with padded shoulders over a pink silk shirt and was carefully made up with pink and brown eyeshadow...Her hair rolled into a passable pageboy and sometimes tied back with a black ribbon. She stopped short of perfume" (18).

I have shortened this lengthy description of the two Vals simply to make life easier for you, my dear readers. This duality interested me because unlike the most notable literary cases of the a divided persona ( Jekyll and Hyde) here the focus isn't the "good" self and the "bad" self, but rather the business self and the personal self or public vs private.


Fitting in with the duality theme is the movie Lost Highway which was on, for reasons I can't even begin to imagine, the Sci-fi channel on saturday. Here we have not just one character split into two halves, but two. Fred ( played by Bill Pullman) is married to Renee ( played by a brunette Patricia Arquette). Fred is discovered with the dead mutilated body of Renee. Fred himself doesn't know if he murdered his wife. In prison, one night, Fred undergoes a transformation and becomes Pete ( played by Balthazar Getty). Pete then meets Alice (played by a Blonde Patricia Arquette). Pete and Alice become lovers. At Alice's urging, Pete robs and inadvertently kills a character named Andy ( Andy, incidentally is also a close friend of Fred's-Andy also knew Renee). The two flee into the desert where Alice vanishes and Pete transforms back into Fred. Fred is then told by a mysterious man ( played by Robert Blake) who appears throughout the film, that there is no Alice, the girl's name is Renee.

If the film sounds confusing, that's because it is. I am big fan of Lynch not in the least because I like his visual style. Generally in the world of Lynchian drama, psychological realities are made physically manifest. In this case, Fred kills his wife, suspecting that she has a secret life and indeed a secret lover. He can not accept that he murdered his wife, and he flees into an alternate identity, Pete, a younger sweeter, "good" self. Unfortunately he can not fully escape, and Renee appears as Alice, another "good" self( like with the smurfs, the blonde hair is a tip off that this "version" is good, while the brunette is evil). But the fantasy can not hold out. And reality keeps trickling in.

Tha Alice and Renee are the same woman is made clear several ways. Both Alice and Renee are pictured wearing the same ensembles. Conversations are also repeated. Fred asks Renee how she met Andy and she responds "I met him at a place called Mokes. He told me about a job." Fred asks her what job, but she waves him saying "I don't remember." Later Pete asks Alice how she met Andy and she says "I met him at a place called Mokes. He told me about a job." Pete responds "Doing pornos?" "No" she replies, "Just a job." She then elaborates on what happened. That Alice and Renee both encountered the same character at the same location for the same reason strongly suggests that they are indeed one and the same girl. Certainly that Arquette plays both characters seems to suggest that Alice is Renee, disguised only by some peroxide.

Fred and Pete, despite being played by different actors, are also the same character, or more accurately Pete is a construct of Fred. He is younger, and also as opposed to Renee and Fred's relationship, he is the object of desire for many women. Alice pursues Pete, not the other way around, which makes Pete feel, initially, as if he is in control of the relationship. Fred feels that Renee is out of his control and so this fantasy also satisfies Fred's desire to re-assert his power over his wife. ( His murder of her can also be viewed as an assertion, if only physically, of his power over his wife.) There is the same repetition of dialogue here as with Alice/Renee. Here the repetition of dialogue occurs with the Mystery Man. MM walks up to Fred at a party and says "We've met before, haven't we?" When Fred asks where, MM replies "At your house. In fact I'm there now." MM hands Fred a phone and instructs him to call his own house. Fred obeys and the phone is answered by MM. This exact conversation is mirror later with Pete. Finally both Pete and Fred experience the same physical ailments-bloody noses, head aches, black outs, and blurring of vision ( which suggest that Fred may be suffering from a brain tumor).

At the end of the movie, it becomes clear that Fred is divided not into two selves but rather three. The mysterious and dark MM is the third self. This explains MMs sudden disappearances and reappearances, but it also explains the ominious "We've met before" statement. They've met before because MM IS a part of Fred. MM also hands Fred the knife to kill Mr. Eddy. When the knife wound fails to kill him, MM picks up a gun and shoots Mr Eddy in the head, indicating that this third self is the "bad" self. Fred can't accept that he is a murderer, even though he can accept having murderous intent. MM then is called in to successful perform the murder. He appears only as long as he needed to kill Mr Eddy and then he vanishes again. ( For the entire typed screenplay of Lost Highway-go here)

Duality has long been of interest to me and particular various forms of duality. There are the half man-half beast hybrids from greek and roman mythology-the centaurs, the satyrs, and the silenii-which can be seen as representing the dual nature of man: bestial and intellectual. Machiavelli, in the Prince, wrote that it was not an accident that a centaur educated a paragon of princes. Machiavelli felt such a myth illustrated that the prince must have both drives in balance.

Gemini, the atrological sign, is represented not by twins in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, but by the Lovers card. The Lovers, although many take it as a sign of romance, can be interpreted to mean a fully integrated self-both natures, male and female, living in harmony and in balance. The division here is not good and bad or public and private, but rather gender oriented.

For me the duality manifests itself in many ways. Of course, there is the public and private self, and the good and bad self, but the division I feel most accutely is the division between the disabled and the capable self-or the front vs the reality. This maybe why I am so intrigued by Lost Highway because here is a case where a character tries to create a "front" but he ultimately experiences the same anguish as his "real" counterpart. For me, as time goes on, the division isn't fused but becomes more accute. I feel more seperated. The good girl and the bad girl, which used to be closer to a whole, have now become very clearly differentiated. The most clear outward manifestation of the difference, for me, is generally through the hair. If my hair is pulled up or back, then I am the good, public self. When my hair is completely down, I am either the bad self or in private. This isn't a conscious choice, it's just something I have noticed. And this isn't too say if I shift between one or the other that I take time out to redo my hair.

The question remains, however, when dealing with such division which is the true self? In films, the "true self" is clear. For example, in Lost Highway, that Fred is the "true self" is made clear, but in reality, this disinction is much harder to make. When the self becomes splintered, how do you pick which is the real you?